We worked together quite a bit earlier this year, trying to develop a workflow that allowed cue lists that don't overlap in fixture assignments to be switched without clearing the lighting settings for other cue lists.

Before v3.6.0.55, we could recall a Washes cue list (e.g. "Blue") and then recall a Profiles cue list (e.g. "Warm White") and the washes would remain blue. As of v3.6.0.55, recalling a cue from any of these cue lists turns off the fixtures not included in that cue list. That essentially leaves us unable to upgrade to v3.6.0.55 and have reverted to our previous version of the OS.

Was the change in how cue lists recall intentional? Was there a design change that makes our desired workflow no longer supported? I'd like to understand whether there is a way for us to get the behavior we need with v3.6.0.55 and future versions of the OS.

Yes, we already went through that months ago. The cue lists in question do not have initial smart blocks and have supported ad hoc cue changes in all previous versions of the NEO software (since the time I first worked with you to get this resolved).

Those same cue lists do not work the same way in 3.6.0.55. Even without the initial smart block, running any cue causes state to change for fixtures not included in the cue. I had to revert the software to the previous build to get those same cue lists functioning as needed.

Looking at what you are doing its as I would expect it to be and I am a little surprised that this use to work. I think what you where experiencing was a bug in the previous version.
Using the cue list editor window (or the sidebar) you can only have one cue active at any one time. If you want to overlay cues from multiple cue lists you need to put each cue list in its own playback. When you double click on the cue in the secondary cue list the software is switching that cue list into the master playback and in the process it releases the old cue list.

If you want to just apply channels to a cue state you can use the syntax:
{channel list} @ cue {cue number}

I'm surprised by your response because Bobby spent many hours working on the previous approach with us and was the one that indicated that using cue lists without initial smart blocks was the way to get the behavior we wanted.

I will talk it through with Bobby when I get a chance and get his take on it.

To put a cue list into a playback click on the "Select" button on the console. You should see a popup asking you to select the cue list you want on that playback.
Or if you are using the offline version you can open the "Cue playbacks" window form a button along the bottom.

OK, I think I've got that working but it leads to another challenge. Is there a way to switch between playbacks onscreen without using the popup menu? Can you show each cue list in a separate window onscreen simultaneously? Or is there a way of picking which cue list is shown in the master playback with a single click. The popup menu is too awkward/slow for us to get between the cue lists on the fly. We rarely if ever advance sequentially through the cue list. We always need random access to the cues and access to multiple cue lists at the same time.

I need access to multiple cue lists at the same time. That's why we access them in the edit view because it's easy there to jump between cue lists and grab non-overlapping cues. Bobby steered us in that direction because we found that we couldn't put cues in the same list and keep them from altering fixtures not included in the cue.

It sure seems like this "fix" that has been introduced will essentially prevent us from using the NEO for our purposes. We can live with it as-is for now but at some point, the fact that we can't upgrade the OS to take advantage of new functionality and other fixes will probably become a real problem.